By a Lake, Perhaps

by Charles Stein

dream.  where the site of sleep itself
has been ((p)re))arranged.  I lie down
in the space
prepared for me
as for a guest
and go to sleep
and continue with my dream.

I dose off
writing this
and take up the dreamabout which   I am now
not quite certain
I have been writing (dreaming).

I wake
and am concerned . . .
but I do not know
with what
concerned.  I am
awake now
awaiting
the next bout of slumber.

Will it come ? . . .

When will it come ?

I cannot call to return to it.

But it came
somewhere
between
the
“will it come ?”
and the
        “when will it come ?”

There was a vast library.
Then I wake.
I write again.
It came again.
The people on the
café patio
where I write this.  Their movement,
their voices.
Truck noise.

What is sleep
that it lurks
like a small boat
in the mind stream —
then becomes the mind itself —
a dream of the mind stream
when the pen falls
silent but the nib tip
still dribbles
incontinent scribbling
down the page.

A woman by a lake.

Sleep while still awake
and waiting.

I close my eyes.

Someone is trying to move
an old man
seated in a whicker-work wheel-chair
off from the scene of his awakeness
to a place more
hospitable to his dreaming . . .

by a lake, perhaps.